The latest food trend on social media has all the ingredients needed to reach viral status. For starters: it’s cake (people love the stuff, from #fails to the is-it-cake meme), plus there’s a crazy visual stunt and … Taylor Swift.
If the “burn-away cake” has shown up on your feed, you’re hardly alone.
The on-fire confections consist of a standard iced cake topped with an image printed on paper that is set ablaze, causing it to burn away and reveal another image underneath. Though such creations have existed for at least a few years, the dessert’s newly spiking popularity can be credited to a couple of bakers.
Illinois-based Denise Steward, who posts as Denise’s Delights on social media, posted a video of a cake inspired by both New Year’s and Swift in which a top with a midnight countdown burned off to reveal the message, “In My 2024 Era.”
Steward’s videos inspired Ontario-based baker Namaya Navaratnarajah (she’s @cakesbynams on social media), whose creations include cakes featuring (more) Swift, Pokémon and “The Hunger Games” and have been viewed more than 100 million times on TikTok. The trend has spread, with other bakers creating their own versions to mark birthdays, anniversaries and (of course) gender reveals.
Navaratnarajah thinks the reason the cakes caught on is that people are looking to create special moments at their celebrations. “People want some sort of wow factor,” she says in an interview. “It’s something new.”
Ellen DeGeneres confirmed the burn-away cakes’ everywhere-right-now status last week when she posted an Instagram video of her own pickleball-themed one. “How do they do it?” the former talk show host marveled, as the flames revealed a birthday greeting.
The answer to her question is less sorcery than careful layering and the right equipment.
Various online tutorials explain that the key to the eye-catching trick is to use a regular edible image for the bottom layer, which is then surrounded by a thick border of piped icing to create space between the layers. The top image is printed on wafer paper — a thinner, flammable product — and finished with another iced border.
Navaratnarajah owns her own edible-ink printer because of her bakery business, but she says before she invested in the pricey equipment, she had her local grocery print images for her, which she suggested might be an option for others wanting to try the trend.
A lot of the fun of it is in the order of the successive images. Navaratnarajah’s first big hit was a cake showing an image of Swift’s blank Instagram page, a reference to the time in 2017 when the pop icon wiped all her social media pages, sending the internet into a frenzy of speculation, only to use the dramatic pause to launch her album, “Reputation.” That image burns away — to the tune of “Look What You Made Me Do” — to reveal a photo of Swift, with a caption teasing her yet-to-be-released “Reputation (Taylor’s Version).” That video has been viewed 20.5 million times.
Another “double layer” cake (which has racked up 37 million views) at first shows the Pokémon character Charmander, with successive layers burning to reveal the character’s evolution into Charmeleon and finally into Charizard.
People are making birthday cakes with multiple messages, like DeGeneres’s. And of course, burn-away cakes offer just the right amount of suspense to make them perfectly suited for gender reveals (and although they do involve live flames, at least they’re a little safer than some stunts). Another popular subgenre is “Mean Girls”-inspired, with references to the movie’s “burn book” playing into the pyro-happy format.
Navaratnarajah says she’s enjoyed the way her pop-culture-inspired cakes have created excitement among their various subjects’ fandoms. But her favorites are more personal, such as the one she recently made for a guy’s birthday. The top layer was a birthday message, but underneath, there was a proposal to his girlfriend. “I just loved the way he took this moment that was supposed to be about him and made it special for them both,” she says.
She notes that the cake-baking world is always chasing the next new thing, such as the glitter hearts that were “everywhere” last year. But she thinks the burn-away has some staying power. “There’s something new coming all the time, so it’s hard for a fad to become a trend,” she says. “But I think might be here to stay for a while — at least I hope.”
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